Rome Redux

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

In our inconclusive elections, President Trump has already gained some ground. So it’s increasingly clear that the US is following ancient Rome’s road to ruin. Our democracy has forgotten the men and women who built this nation and made it great, and they are following the demagogue who claims to be on their side.

Whether Trump wins or loses is not the point. We’ll know in a few days or (after litigation) weeks.

But a win or loss will still be narrow, fretful and disputed. As David Brooks observed last night after watching Democrats’ dreams of a landslide evaporate, Trump’s “populism” is the dominant new force in American politics. Now it’s all about the forgotten voters.

Rome’s forgotten were different from America’s today. In Rome, they were the soldiers whose legions had built the ever-expanding Roman Empire and had protected it as the tide of conquered peoples pushed back.

Life for soldiers was tough back then. You had to survive twenty years of close hand-to-hand combat, in which leaders and grunts participated equally.

That twenty years is what it takes today to retire from the US armed forces. You have to give your country the twenty best years of your life. But a soldier’s life was much tougher then. Today we live seventy or more years; then the average person was lucky to see fifty. Today we have modern medicine and antibiotics. Then, if you got more than a scratch, you’d likely die.

So a Roman soldier had to survive twenty years of hand-to-hand combat without more than a scratch, plus forced marches, mostly on foot, across continents and diseases like dysentery, malaria and cholera, for which there was no cure. If you still managed to survive all that, Rome promised you a plot of fertile land where you could build a house and farm and raise a family in peace. (Rome also offered conquered people citizenship after twenty years of loyal military service. That was a great incentive for assimilation.)

The trouble was Rome’s business people, who broke that promise. Many were Roman Senators and thus presumed guardians of democracy. But they built up business debts they couldn’t pay. They used the State as a cash cow. They forgot about the Roman soldiers, and the rest is history.

Julius Caesar came along and promised to make the forgotten soldiers whole. He asked them to fight for him, rather than against foreign enemies, and promised to give them what they wanted. (Sound familiar?)

Roman Senators killed Caesar, but the movement he started drove the Pompeiian Civil wars, and Rome went straight down hill. It lasted several centuries more, but its greatness was history. The Roman soldier who had built the Empire was no longer on its side.

Of course the details are different today. It’s the twenty first century after Christ, not the first beforehand. But the story is essentially the same.

Manufacturing workers built this nation and its industrial might. When history called them, they rose as soldiers to fight the two greatest military tyrannies the world had ever produced: Nazi Germany’s and Imperial Japan’s. When they came home, they got their just rewards, and the US became the strongest, wealthiest and happiest nation in human history.

Here our story deviates a bit. Unlike ancient Roman business, US business wasn’t wallowing in debt. Instead, it was wallowing in profit but fearful of foreign competition. And the ones who eventually rebelled were industrial workers, not soldiers.

But our story’s essence is the same. The business elite sold the ordinary people who built America out. They sold their jobs, factories and technology to China and Mexico to avoid competition and for greater profit. They became the one percenters, while the workers they abandoned lost their factories, towns and jobs and died of despair and opioid poisoning.

The moral of both stories is simple. When you abandon the people who built your nation, your nation fails.

It doesn’t matter whether the immediate trigger is a charlatan, a con-man, or a complete idiot who lacks the discipline and good sense to plan his own funeral, let alone to wear a mask in a pandemic. For all we know—blinded by the mists of history and the tendency of ancient Rome to glorify its leaders—Julius Caesar was much like Donald Trump. Both saw a chance to rise on the dreams of forgotten and neglected citizens, and both took it.

(Trump reportedly promised to secure an obscure Native American tribe at the border of North and South Carolina federal recognition, and he won the vote of their county decisively. Whether he’ll ever fulfill that promise doesn’t matter; he got their votes.)

The solution today is equally simple. Whoever wins the election, the first priority should be onshoring good, skilled jobs. That means, at a minimum, a gigantic infrastructure bill worth two trillion dollars or more. The infrastructure bill of course can include solar arrays, windmills and safe nuclear energy to fight global warming.

Whoever wins the election, that should be first priority, as jobs for skilled workers will fix our nation’s fate. Second priority is managing our relationship with China and Mexico to keep and rebuild skilled jobs on shore. If necessary, that may mean clamping export controls on technology we develop and imposing rifle-shot (not categorical) tariffs on foreign products that threaten our skilled workers’ jobs.

Third priority, as I have written (click here and here), is passing laws and (if necessary) shuffling courts so that every American has an equal vote, not just in theory, but in practice. But that third priority may have to wait, for two reasons. First, if Trump wins the presidency or Republicans keep the Senate, there will be no way to implement it. Second, if the workers who built this nation follow Trump down the black hole of racism, tribalism, and “planning” on Trump’s whim, we won’t have a nation, whether democratic or otherwise.

We must placate the workers who elected Trump, and may elect him again, or we are lost.

Maybe future leaders of a future Enlightenment may create something like the US at some future time. Maybe they will learn from our mistakes as we failed to learn from ancient Rome’s. But 1,300 years, give or take, passed between Rome’s fall and our Declaration of Independence. So don’t hold your breath, or your grandchildren’s.

A democracy cannot survive by betraying the people who built it. If we haven’t learned that in two millennia, then maybe we don’t deserve democracy.

Permalink to this post